Gossamer Part 10

"But we never talk about such things," she said. "Never, never. Our life together is sacred, hallowed, a thing apart,

"'Above the smoke and stir of this dim spot Which men call earth.'"

It surprised me to hear Mrs. Ascher quote Milton. I did not somehow expect to find that she knew or liked that particular poet. I am nearly sure he would not have liked her.

"We cannot desecrate our union," she said, "by talking about money."

The subject to be discussed with Ascher was plainly not money, but Tim Gorman's soul. Money only came incidentally. However, there was no use arguing a point like that. There was no use arguing any point. I gave in and promised to see Ascher about the matter. I prefer Ascher to Gorman if I have to persuade any one to act midwife at the birth of a cash register. Gorman would be certain to laugh. Ascher would at all events listen to me courteously.

"To-morrow," said Mrs. Ascher.

"Certainly," I said. "To-morrow, quite early."

Mrs. Ascher uncoiled herself and rose from the floor. I struggled to my feet rather stiffly, for my stool was far too low. She took my hand and held it. I feared for a moment that she meant to kiss it.

"Thank you," she whispered. "Thank you again and again."

I took a long walk after I left the studio. I wanted to a.s.similate a new fact, to get my mental vision into focus again.

Ever since I thought about things at all, I have regarded the "artist"

outlook upon life as a pose, and the claim to artistic temperament as an excuse for selfishness and bad temper in private life. Mrs. Ascher had convinced me that, in her case at least, the artist soul is a reality.

She was hysterical and ridiculous when she talked to me, but she was sincere. She was not posing even when she crumpled herself upon the floor and looked like a sick serpent. She was in simple earnest when she mouthed her lines about money, money. There might be, probably were, several other people in the world like Mrs. Ascher, might even be many others. That was the new fact which I wanted to digest.

I reflected that I myself was kin to her, had in me, latent and undeveloped, an artist's soul. I had felt the thing fluttering when I lost my self-control and talked flamboyantly about the head of Tim Gorman. It was necessary that I should keep a firm grip on myself. I belong to a cla.s.s which has lost everything except its sanity. I think it is true of the Irish aristocracy that even its period of greatest glory, even when Grattan was waving his arms and shouting "Esto Perpetua!" it remained sane. I have nothing else left of what my forefathers bequeathed to me, but I still have this temperament. A man clings desperately to the last remnants of his heritage.

The artist's soul is a reality. I admitted that. But it is also a disease. I had learned to believe in it as a man learns to believe in influenza when his temperature runs up to 104 degrees and his bones ache furiously. But there is a difference between admitting the existence of a disease and deliberately cultivating the germs of it.

I crossed 5th Avenue at 32nd Street in great peril of my life, for the traffic at that point is as wild as the emotions of the artistic soul.

It came into my mind that quite possibly the thrills and throbs which Mrs. Ascher enjoys, of which I myself had a brief and mild experience, are not only real, but worth while. There may after all be something greater in the world than common sense. I fell to dreaming of what life might be like to the man who refused to take it as it is, who insisted on seeing above him, not silly little twinkling stars, but great worlds coursing through the infinite s.p.a.ces of eternity. I ran into a boy carrying books, while I was thinking about eternity. His books were scattered over the pavement and I hurt my knee. I decided that my faint longing for what Mrs. Ascher would call "higher possibilities" is a temptation, something to be conquered. I finished my meditation with a "Retro Satanas" and returned to my hotel for luncheon, confident that I should come out victor in my struggle.

Ascher has certainly far more determination and force of character than I have; but he does not seem able to break himself of the habit of making money. His wife says that he hates doing it and wants to stop.

But he goes on doing it. He has formed a habit of making money, and habit is almost unconquerable. It was plainly the path of wisdom for me to check my tendency towards art at the very beginning, not to allow the habit of feeling artistically, indeed of feeling at all, to form itself.

CHAPTER VII.

I had no idea of breaking the promise I made Mrs. Ascher; but I felt a certain hesitation about entering again the Holiest of Holies in the office of Ascher, Stutz & Co. I was a little afraid of Stutz, who seemed to me a severe man, very little tolerant of human folly. Still I would have faced Stutz without shrinking, especially in a good cause. What I really disliked was the idea of suggesting a business policy to Ascher. The man was immeasurably my superior in natural ability and in experience. I felt that I should be guilty of insolence if I offered him any advice, and of something worse than insolence if I insisted on my advice being taken. Yet it was just this which Mrs. Ascher expected of me, and I did not want to disappoint her.

It is true that I was a shareholder in the New Excelsior Cash Register Company. I may have been a director. Gorman said something about my being a director. I had accepted the office, pledged beforehand to the approval of Gorman's policy and therefore had no right to intervene.

What claim had I to insist on Ascher's doing this or that? I should not feel myself justified in calling on an archbishop and insisting on drastic alterations in the Apostle's Creed. Ascher is at least an archbishop, possibly a patriarch, or even a cardinal, in that truly catholic church which worships Mammon.

But I had promised.

I went to the office next morning, early. Having forgotten to make an appointment with Ascher beforehand I had to wait some time before I saw him. I sat in the large anteroom through which I had pa.s.sed when I first visited the office with Gorman. Through the gla.s.s door I was able to see the public office outside where men went busily to and fro.

I understood just enough about this business of Ascher's to be able to read romance, the romance which was certainly there, in the movements of the quiet men who pa.s.sed and repa.s.sed before my eyes, or bent with rarely lifted heads over huge ledgers, or turned over with deft fingers piles of papers in stuffed filing boxes. These men were in touch with the furthest ends of the earth. Coded telegrams fluttered from their hands and went vibrating across thousands of miles of land or through the still depths of oceans, over unlighted tracts of ooze on the sea-bottom. In London the words were read and men set free pent up, dammed streams of money. In Hongkong the words were read and some steamer went out, laden, from her harbour. Gold was poured into the hands of tea-planters in Ceylon. Scanty wages in strange coins, dribbled out to factory workers in Russian cotton mills. Gangs of navvies went to work laying railway lines across the veldt in Bechua.n.a.land. There was no end to the energy controlled, directed by these cable messages, nor any bounds to the field of their influence. Somewhere in Ireland a farmer would go home along a desolate road, crossing brown bogs, thirsty and disconsolate, his lean beasts unsold at a fair where buyers were scarce or shy. What did he know of Ascher or Ascher know of him? Yet the price which he might take or must refuse for those hardly reared bullocks of his depended at the end of a long chain, on what the Aschers in their office said and did.

Perhaps hardly one of all the busy men I watched quite knew what he was doing. They juggled with figures, made precis of the reports of money markets, dissected and a.n.a.lysed the balance sheets of railway companies, decoded messages from London or from Paris, transcribed formulae as abstract, as remote from tangible things as the x and y of algebraic equations. These men all worked--the apologue of the quadratic equation held my mind--moving their symbols here and there, extracting roots, dissolving close-knit phrases into factors, cancelling, simplifying, but always dealing with symbols meaningless, unreal in themselves. Behind them was Ascher, Ascher and I suppose Stutz, who expressed realities in formulae, and, when the sums were done, extracted realities from the formulae again, achieving through the seemingly sterile processes new facts, fresh grasp of the things which are, greater power to deal with them. They knew and understood and held the whole world in leading strings, delicate as silk, invisible, impalpable, but strong.

The door of Ascher's private office opened and a man pa.s.sed out. I glanced at him. He was a clean-shaved, keen-eyed, square-jawed man, the type which American business methods have produced, a man of resource and quick decision, but a man, so I guessed, who dealt with things, and money only as the price of things, the reward of making them. He lacked, so I felt, something of the fine spirituality of Ascher, the scientific abstraction of the man who lives in a rarer atmosphere of pure finance.

A clerk at my elbow invited me to leave my place and take my turn with Ascher.

I could not bring myself to plunge straightway into my business. I began by pretending that I had no real business at all.

"Any chance," I asked, "of our being travelling companions again? I am leaving New York almost at once."

"I'm afraid not," said Ascher. "I've a great deal to do here still."

"Those Mexican affairs?"

"Those among others."

"The Government here seems to be making rather a muddle of Mexico," I said.

Opinion on this subject was, so far as I knew, nearly unanimous among business men. Every one who owned shares in Mexican companies, every one who had invested hopefully a little while before in Mexican railways, every one who had any kind of interest in Mexico was of the same opinion about the inaction of the American Government.

"I think it is a muddle," said Ascher, "but the idea in the minds of the men who are making the muddle is a fine one. If only the world could be worked on those principles----"

"But it can't."

"Not yet," said Ascher. "Perhaps never. Yet the idea on which the Government in Washington proceeds is a n.o.ble one. Respect for const.i.tutional order should be a greater thing as a principle of statesmanship than obvious expediency."

The man's unnatural detachment of view worried me. It was the same when Gorman blared out his stereotyped abuse of financiers, his well-worn cliches about money kings and poison spiders. Ascher agreed with him. Ascher, apparently, had some approval for the doctrinaire const.i.tutionalism of university professors turned diplomats. I could not follow him to those heights of his.

"I was thinking," I said, "of going home by way of the West Indies."

"Yes? You will find it very agreeable. I was there in 1903 and remember enjoying myself greatly."

"I wish you and Mrs. Ascher would come too. It would be much pleasanter for me if I had you with me.

"It's very kind of you to say so; but----"

"Besides," I said, "I should see so much more. If I go by myself I shall step from a steamer into an hotel and from an hotel into a steamer.

I shall be forced to buy a Baedeker, if there is a Baedeker for those regions. I shall be a tourist of the ordinary kind. But if I travelled with you I should really see things."

Ascher took up the telephone receiver.

"If you like," he said, "I can give you letters of introduction to our correspondents wherever you go. They are bankers, of course, but you will find them intelligent men."

He summoned a clerk.

"If you give me an idea of your route----" he said.

"At present," I said, "my plans are very vague. I haven't settled anything. Perhaps you will give me your advice."